Idle No More? Let’s get serious

Members of the Spirit of Kitlope dancers and drummers from the Haisla First Nation take part in a rally in support of the Idle No More movement, in Kitimat, B.C. on Sunday Dec 30, 2012. As well as voicing support for the hunger strike by Chief Theresa Spence, Haisla members spoke of their opposition to the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Robin RowlandPhoto by
Robin Rowland

There’s something unspeakably creepy about this whole thing.

Aboriginal teenagers in Canada are perhaps six times more likely to kill themselves than non-aboriginal youth. Among the Inuit, youth suicide is 11 times the national average. Between 2005 and 2010, Health Canada spent $65 million on a National Aboriginal Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy. The kids kept on killing themselves, and in 2011 the Ontario Chief Coroner’s Office released a 215-page report on aboriginal suicides in Northern Ontario. One of the report’s key recommendations: the creation of a national suicide prevention strategy.

Then along comes Theresa Spence, the elected chief of the forlorn and remote Northern Ontario community of Attawapiskat. Since Dec. 11, Spence has been camped in a teepee on an island in the Ottawa River, threatening to starve herself to death — to kill herself — unless the prime minister and the Governor General accede to her variously contradictory and ambiguous demands.

“Activist” opinion in Canada is actually cheering her on. We are all expected to be moved by Spence’s hunger strike, to be humbled, and to be ashamed of ourselves as Canadians. Out of empathy, you understand.

In the remote Ontario community of Pikangikum, an Ojibwa reserve about 300 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, the suicide rate is roughly 20 times the Canadian average. Kids kill themselves there all the time. It’s a grim place of drug addicts and adolescent gas-sniffers and random violence where only one in five of the houses has any indoor plumbing and hardly anybody has a job. About 2,400 people live there, but in 2011 Pikangikum generated almost 5,000 calls to the police that resulted in roughly 3,600 “lockups.” Over the past 20 years, 96 Pikangikum residents, mostly kids, have killed themselves.

Empathy, I get. If I were a 14-year-old boy living in Pikangikum with no prospect of getting out, I’d probably want to kill myself too. What is far more difficult to get one’s head around is just what possible good might come from Idle No More, the recently erupted viral craze that has attached itself to Chief Spence specifically, and to aboriginal grievances in Canada more amorphously.

So far, it’s shaping up to look a lot like last year’s Occupy Wall Street conniption, the thing the activist avant-garde insisted was going to be the great anti-corporate insurrection that counterculture icon Naomi Klein always wanted. Our very own Arab Spring! It ended up more like the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962, and so far, Idle No More appears headed in exactly the same direction.

In place of the Occupists’ elaborate sign language and call-and-response rituals, Idlers specialize in flash-mob round dances in shopping malls. The erstwhile leadership relies on a lexicon that combines trippy references to Mother Earth with paranoid claims about the hidden contents of Bill C-45, the vulgar means by which Prime Minister Stephen Harper forced his 2012 legislative agenda though Parliament.

The Idlers say they want “a revolution which honours and fulfils Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water.” They say the Harper government treats Canada’s aboriginal leadership with contempt, but they also say they aren’t accountable to the elected chiefs either. They say a lot of things, and a lot of excitement this might well prove to be, but a revolutionary movement it most certainly is not.

“These celebratory protest gatherings are all very good, but they’re not going to get us anywhere,” says Ernie Crey, the 62-year-old former vice-president of the United Native Nations, veteran aboriginal fishing rights activist and co-author of the award-winning Stolen from Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities. “It’s really colourful and everything, but it’s really unrealistic stuff. What’s not going to work is all this stuff about transformational change in the consciousness of white North Americans.”

It’s not that Crey is claiming knowledge of some other, more magic way forward. His point is that there isn’t one, and we all need to stop looking for it.

“We’ve got to get past this stage,” Crey told me. “There is no magic policy bullet that’s going to come out of some meeting with the prime minister or the Indian Affairs minister. We’re dealing with issues here that have bedevilled the very best of the aboriginal leadership for years.”

Just one of those confounding issues is the bleak and broken urban landscapes in which tens of thousands of aboriginal people have found themselves. For Crey, this isn’t just political. It’s personal. Long an advocate for the largely voiceless aboriginal people of Canada’s inner cities, Crey ended up one of the most prominent voices in Vancouver’s ghastly “Missing Women” tragedy. The DNA of his own sister, Dawn, was found on serial killer Robert Pickton’s pig farm in 2004.

Aboriginal self-government is all well and good and “nation to nation” relationships sounds just fine, but hiving off aboriginal people into separate health and welfare streams, for instance, can have disastrous results. Establishing separate aboriginal support systems in the cities might seem perfectly consistent with a respect for aboriginal culture, Crey said, but what that has come to mean for Vancouver’s suicide-prone aboriginal kids is their relegation to “social service ghettos.”

Last summer, the segregated social-service system in Vancouver was identified by aboriginal agency workers as a major cause of a “suicide pact” involving 30 aboriginal kids in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. These kinds of complexities are not going to be resolved by stirring speeches about Turtle Island at shopping mall rallies, Crey said.

“We have to get down to brass tacks here. To get anywhere, you need to be tightly organized. You have to formulate a serious program. You need a strategy that you’re following, with a concrete agenda. And you have to be able to articulate real and achievable goals. You’ve got to be very suspicious of national visions, or visions of any kind,” Crey said.

“You’re not going to get anywhere by throwing around big words like ‘sovereignty’ and ‘colonization’ and telling white people they need to decolonize themselves.”

Terry Glavin is an author and journalist whose most recent book is Come From the Shadows.

“Affordability” was the NDP’s big buzz word in last year’s election campaign, helping propel John Horgan...

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.

Almost Done!

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.